One of the better weapons used by the Royal Navy during WWI was the 13.5-inch (343mm) Mark V, mounted on numerous battleship classes and found to be far superior to the earlier 12-inch (305mm) designs it superseded. At the beginning of WW2 the RN still carried a number of these weapons in storage, along with plentiful supplies of ammunition and propellant charges. The decision was made to release some of these barrels and fit them to the leftover railway mountings to produce three complete ‘new’ weapon systems. By summer of 1940, the guns had been converted, had satisfactorily completed their operational trials, and had been handed over to the Royal Marine Siege Regiment as three identical railway guns known as Sceneshifter, Piecemaker and Gladiator.
The weapons had been used sparingly so far and to good effect on occasion, and the photographs Squadron Leader Richardson’s Mustang had returned with the day before had provided sufficient evidence that it was now well worth the risk of bringing the guns into action once more to deal with the new threat developing near Sangatte. Safe from aerial attack or from prying eyes in the sky above, the weapons had spent most of their daylight hours in the last month or so biding their time inside the relative safety of the Guston railway tunnel. Entering the southern mouth of the tunnel, not far from the intersection of Dover and Old Charlton Roads, the twin tracks of the East Kent Light Railway ran underground for almost 1,300 metres heading north-north-east, passing beneath the A2 between Swingate and Whitfield, before running out into the open air once more a few hundred metres south of Guston.
A branch line specifically constructed for the guns diverted off to the east a thousand metres or so beyond the northern mouth of the tunnel and continued on for several kilometres through Kent farmland before reaching its termination in an open field between Westcliffe and St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe that was perhaps five kilometres north-east of Dover. Within that field, the track terminated in a long, shallow semi-circle, and just before noon on that clear autumn morning, railway gun Piecemaker had been brought out from under cover and shunted halfway around that curve by a small but powerful diesel locomotive, its attendant ammunition wagons in tow.
Admiralty Pier was part of the Port of Dover and extended out into The Channel as the western breakwater, the Dover lighthouse at its very end standing guard over the port entrance. With its own rail station — Dover Marine — the pier served during peacetime as the embarkation point for several cross-channel train services including the luxurious Golden Arrow London-Paris Pullman service. With connections to the Southern Railway Network (formed out of the amalgamation of the South-Eastern (SER) and London, Chatham & Dover (LCDR) services), the branch line joined the main network outside the port near Archcliffe Road, where trains could either be directed south-west toward Folkestone or instead head through the town centre to the north and continue on toward Canterbury and on to London.
The pier had once been the site of a residential slum, however this had been cleared out during the 1930s, with most of the residents moving to newly constructed rows of flats on Limekiln Rd, on the western side of the tracks. Limekiln met Archcliffe Rd and the main carriageway out of town to the south, and the imposing Archcliffe Fort stood above the bend in the railway line as it turned toward Folkestone. Looking out to sea from the headland above the harbour, the fort backed onto Archcliffe road and stood on land that in one form or another had been fortified since the construction of a watchtower in 1370AD. The site had undergone significant modification during the reign of Henry VIII, and was again rebuilt and expanded several times during the 1700s as a result of the Napoleonic Wars.
Sceneshifter had come down from Guston Tunnel and the East Kent Light Railway that morning in the opposite direction to that of Piecemaker, joining the eastern (Dover) line near Buckland. The gun, its attendant wagons and locomotive were now motionless on a bend in the main line, positioned in the lee of the fort above and at exactly the right point around the curved track to bring its muzzle to bear on its designated target on the other side of The Channel. Civilian trains were scarce during daylight hours due to the threat of air attack and bombardment from France, and the War Department had in any case made sure that all rail services in the Dover and Folkestone areas had been suspended for the morning while the guns were brought into position.
As the name suggested, the Hythe and Sandgate branch line connected these two towns to the SER network at Sandling Junction. Opened in 1874, the patronage was never high due to the stations being positioned somewhat further than was normal from the actual centres of population they were intended to serve. During its early years, a horse-drawn tramline was instituted in an attempt to stimulate usage of the services, however there was insufficient long-term improvement to prevent Sandgate Station from being closed in 1931, the dual tracks reduced to a single line as a result, and in Realtime the entire line would close just twenty years later.
Upon leaving Guston Tunnel, Gladiator had undertaken the longest trip of the three guns that morning. Running in convoy with Sceneshifter as far as Dover, the last of the trio had continued on along the SER line alone, passing through the Shakespeare Cliff and Abbotts Cliffe tunnels respectively (with the Shakespeare Cliff Halt railway siding in between) and on through Folkestone and beyond. It was shunted at Sandling Junction before making its way almost to the end of the Hythe-Sandgate branch line, where a shallow curve in the tracks again presented a perfect angle of ‘traverse’ for firing on France.
The gun crews would normally have been directed remotely by spotter aircraft high above the waves of The Channel, however only the most suicidal RAF pilot or crew would even consider spending any length of time in the sky near the French coast nowadays, and as such they were instead in direct radio communication with forward observers watching the intended target through rangefinding equipment from the cover of the observation post atop Shakespeare Cliff. The increased distance meant there’d be an appreciable loss in accurate spotting, but as it was the only viable alternative, there was nothing else to be done.
All the crews were well-trained and prepared for the task at hand, and there was sufficient ammunition and charges in the wagons behind each gun to in theory ensure the destruction of any target. Sceneshifter would fire a single ranging shot initially, and would be followed by concentrated fire from all three weapons once the fall of shot on target was observed at Shakespeare Cliff and appropriate adjustments to elevation and traverse had been made. The guns fired a special 567kg ‘light’ shell, along with a ‘super’ propellant charge that had both been designed specifically for railway use and enabled the weapons to reach an extended range of over almost forty-five kilometres. They could fire those shells at a rate of around two per minute, and ideally it was intended that only a short bombardment from all three weapons would be all that was required to take care of the new enemy threat across The Channel once and for all.
SS Special Heavy Battery 672(E)